Inclined to be Challenged
Team Acme Inc.
Hard work and creativity, successes and failures: these are only a few aspects of the process Alsion teams had to experience for this year’s Tech Challenge. The competition was held on April 29, 2018 at the Tech in San Jose, California.
The 2018 Tech Challenge prompt may seem simple at first: create a device that can withstand a 10-foot drop and then travel a length of eight feet to deliver a penny–without batteries. Various machines were created by students ranging from grades 6-12, and many of them had similar ideas and structures. Along with this main project, teams are also assigned to create journal entries for every meeting and every improvement made on the device, write a fictional story depicting the team’s actual process and device, and craft a video about the whole design process.
Alsion had two teams join the Tech Challenge this year. Team Acme Inc. included Ali Ashraf, Ananya Hindocha, Ramsey Shafi, Vanshika Sharma, and Blake Werner, and Team Inclined Innovators included Arnav Chittibabu, Ram Charan, Ananda Guha, Tejas Raghuram, and Akash Sethi.
Team Acme Inc. made a car with twisted rubber bands as its main source of energy. which was put in a box that had a pseudo-parachute attached to it. Team Acme’s device was successful in transferring the penny from 10 feet high and eight feet across.
Team Inclined Innovators made a spring-loaded car. Unfortunately, its invention did not pass muster–not during the actual competition, anyway.
Although none of our teams won awards for our actual design, Team Acme did win an award for Top Tech Challenge Story and Team Inclined Innovators created a very well put together video –both of which you can find below.
The Top Tech Challenge Story of 2018 by Team Acme Inc.:
As intergalactic pizza delivery men, our job comes with many hurdles. From fighting off alien bandits to navigating new planets, no one can say our job is easy. Because we don’t want to make things easy for ourselves, our pizza company is a front for a rebel alliance that’s trying to destroy the autocratic rulers known as the Vortex. No matter how difficult this job is, nothing could have prepared us for the events that happened on May 25th, 3025. On the unfortunate day, we were on our way to deliver a pizza and important blueprints of a Vortex stronghold to the rebel headquarters on a isolated planet. Someone within the Vortex must have figured out our plans because as we entered the planet’s airspace everything electronic in our ship was fried. We usually fly the pizza into the headquarters with automatic drones but the central processing unit was completely destroyed. In the moment, we felt like the world was ending. How were we supposed to get the plans to the headquarters, everything electrical and anything powered by batteries was not an option. As we looked around the ship we found the materials for a rubber band powered car. The clock was ticking so the crew scrambled to put together a car that would be able to drive using wound up rubber bands for energy. To sustain the drop, we created a box that would absorb most of the energy from the fall. When the box reached the ground, the energy would release the sticks that kept the rubber bands wound up. The plan was so last minute that everyone was terrified it was not going to work. The drop from our ship to the ground was a long one and the ground was rocky so we hoped that the box would keep the car safe. With our fingers crossed, we dropped our contraption from the deck. Since we couldn’t clearly see the ground, all we could do was hope that our trusty car made it to headquarters and someone from the team recognized the pizza box. Since we did not have any other options, we used the generator on our ship to power us to another safe planet and waited for any sort of message from headquarters. A few hours later we received a radio message saying that our plans had arrived in a rather unconventional way. The blueprints we sent them were going to be used in the next rebel attack on Vortex. Not only that, our rubber band car was going to be replicated and sent to other rebel ships so that they could be prepared in case of another EMP blast. Even though it was a long shot, at the end of the day our car worked perfectly and allowed for the rebel alliance to plan an attack on the Vortex stronghold. One point for creativity and engineering.